Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chilly night on Chicago's Near North Side, and Bill Tomes is sitting comfortably in the warm interior of his silver Buick Park Avenue. Playing softly on the stereo is his favorite cassette, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic's Saint-Saens. For a moment, at least, the melody seems to have transported him away from this place he calls the "killing field," an eerily barren patch of inner-city landscape that glows starkly in his headlights...
...trying to decide between two good job offers when I stopped into St. Joseph's Ukrainian Catholic Church to think things through," he recounts. "When I knelt down, everything turned fuzzy except the face of Christ on a painting near the altar." The image at the altar issued to Tomes the first of several direct orders that would haunt him for the next three years...
...Bill has other gambits too. Realizing that many gangsters spend countless nights holed up in apartments watching sports on television, he recently introduced them to a foreign concept: the sports bar. Initially they turned to Brother Bill to guide them on unfamiliar turf. Nowadays they freely go to Champions near O'Hare Airport and the Alumni Club in downtown Chicago to watch their favorite teams...
...through "the Serengeti grassland system," and as one fellow steps into the open-air vehicle, he asks, "Is it air-conditioned?" No, mate, this is reality. Real crocodiles lazing primordially below that rickety bridge. Actual cheetahs motoring their stretch-limo bodies across the savanna. Genuine loamy smell over there near the warthog. (Hakuna matata, guys--it's only nature's perfume...
...credo: the park is the ride. If the wait time is too long for the big attractions, you can have a blast just glomming the architecture and atmosphere. That is truest in Animal Kingdom. The backrests of park benches are carved as turtles, eagles, crocodiles. Harambe, the African "village" near the safari ride, is not idealized in Magic Kingdom fashion. It is stylized: worn, with cracked pavements below buildings of a Moorish-Disney design that might be called "mosqueteer." For visitors with an antic mind and a free year or two, Dinoland offers a trove of comic minutiae, including "Chester...